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5 Power Macs configured by AVID
Posted by: stynx on 2025-06-24 10:26:37 3x 9600/300 1x 9600/233 1x 9600/200 No Battery leakage and very clean inside. Each Machine has 256Mb EDO Ram.
Posted by: ClassicGuyPhilly on 2025-06-24 10:55:14 Nice, assuming Media Composer? Those don't look like the Avid keyboards though.
Posted by: stynx on 2025-06-24 11:05:34 Nice, assuming Media Composer? Those don't look like the Avid keyboards though. Those are indeed normal extended Apple keyboards. I don't know where the AVID keyboards went to. The music studio where these came from had to shut down because the landlord suddenly ended the contract. These older Macs were in storage together with a lot of audio and video stuff. Sadly, i don't have the space to put away about 20 external 19" chassis (of that 10x are Digidesign 888) or i would have taken them as well. There is still so much stuff that has to be gotten rid of at the end of this month (til monday) else it goes into the bin. I saw five Sony PVM 20" Trinitron monitors in one of the many rooms. The owner is very much fully invested to rescue as much as possible but finding a time-slot to pick up the stuff is very hard. I had to leave work early to make the trip today since he is preoccupied on most days....
Posted by: croissantking on 2025-06-25 06:49:01 Nice haul.
Posted by: stynx on 2025-06-25 12:17:35 Nice haul. Part 2 is already in planning 🙂
Posted by: stynx on 2025-06-29 10:18:45 Barely scratching the surface. There is still so much boxed and bubble wrapped... this will take weeks to sort through
Posted by: herd on 2025-06-29 13:51:03 Nice find! Thanks for sharing. Do you have plans for it?
Posted by: croissantking on 2025-06-29 13:54:35 You’re gonna have to rent that second apartment again!
Posted by: Juror22 on 2025-06-29 13:56:32 just ...wow!
Posted by: ClassicGuyPhilly on 2025-06-29 14:30:13 Amazing great rescue!
Posted by: stynx on 2025-06-29 23:23:22 You’re gonna have to rent that second apartment again! I have made enough space in one of the celler rooms. Question: Whatever will I do with the stuff?! Answer: There is no real goal for the items yet. I think that I will sell off whatever is interesting to someone and give away everything else locally.
Posted by: joshc on 2025-06-30 00:22:07 Nice haul. Funny isn't it, stuff that was once worth tens of thousands of dollars, now reduced to stuff that most people wouldn't want. The 9600 machines alone would've been worth a lot when new. These are also of the era where they're just a bit behind the G3/G4 era to still be used for work. Some people are still using G4s for audio production. My wild guess is that the oldest video production systems still in use are Mac Pro-based ones.
Posted by: aladds on 2025-06-30 00:26:21 I know of a cinema which still uses an 888 as a standalone AES/EBU to Analogue audio adaptor. I had to make a special set of cables since the fancy DCP projector has the "standard" 2xRJ45 audio output, and the Sound Processor (A Dolby CP500, which interestingly enough is a 68k system) has a DB25 input connector. A tangled mess of cables for sure, but it worked well enough that it's still going strong. It's impressive how well these things were built and I would be surprised if there isn't going to be remaining demand for them for quite some time.
Posted by: stynx on 2026-03-22 08:25:50 I have now backed up every HDD i have found in the computers and external cases. I was beginning to test a bunch of those machines when i came across a problem. The most complete systems are the Power Macintosh 9600 "AVID Media Composer". The software seems to be complete and in working order. I was able to record something using the 16-channel audio digitizer with the installed ProTools software. The AudioVision software on the other hand was always saying that the machine is not allowed to run the software. After a bit of searching through the documentation that i own, i found that the AudioVision 4.x software needs a physical dongle, the "Application Key". Sadly, these dongles were seemingly sent back to AVID when the studio upgraded to ProTools HD with some kind of "soft-dongle". The result: There are no dongles anymore and i cannot really play around with the AudioVision software. Is there a way to crack the old AudioVision 4.0 software? Or maybe someone has a "Rainbow Sentinel" ADB-dongle for this software?
Posted by: NJRoadfan on 2026-03-22 16:50:21 9600s were still being used (with AVID IIRC) by the post production team of the Maury talk show back in 2003. They were "old" even back then, but still cranking out trash TV for the masses. 😛
Posted by: Windoze on 2026-03-23 09:53:55 I'm working on reversing the Rainbow Sentinel Eve 3 dongle but this will take a long time until I got something to show. I can have a look at the software, depending on the implementation it might be simple to crack. Can you send me a copy of the AudioVision folder from your system? Feel free to send it via DM here.
Posted by: olePigeon on 2026-03-23 12:20:28 Wow. Digital Betacam and Sony SVHS. I'm insanely jealous.
Posted by: stynx on 2026-03-23 21:43:15 Hi Windoze, Can you send me a copy of the AudioVision folder from your system? I will make a copy of the folder in the next days. It may take a while... -Jonas
Posted by: macinbot on 2026-03-23 22:46:42 This is amazingly WOW! Nice rescue haul. Where was this out of?
Posted by: Unknown_K on 2026-03-23 22:58:50 I'm working on reversing the Rainbow Sentinel Eve 3 dongle but this will take a long time until I got something to show. I can have a look at the software, depending on the implementation it might be simple to crack. Can you send me a copy of the AudioVision folder from your system? Feel free to send it via DM here. That would be cool.
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